Jack Bauer is my Muse

So I went on vacation this last week to Oregon, which was nice a relaxing. I a period of 3 days, I watched an entire season of 24, which I consider to be quite an accomplishment. Here are some of the sketches I did while I was watching.

Just keep swimming...

I was looking through deviant art contests and one particularly caught my eye. It was called "kick your own ass". Seeing this title first conjured up images of seemingly impossible physical feats. However, this contest is really about seeing how far you have come by remaking an art piece from your past. You can look at the winners HERE. The results are truly inspiring. As a young artist, it is often discouraging to look at other artists that you admire, thinking "I'll never get there". What I am beginning to realize though is just how much improvement you can really make over such a short period of time. Go check the winners out and be prepared to be encouraged by the amount of improvement most have them have made in 4 years.

New Wacom!!!!

I just got a new Wacom Intuos 4 and it rocks! I have been playing with it and it is so much better than using the old graphire I have had for 5 years. The pencil on paper feel is particularly nice. Anyway, I joined a drawing group called "Though Faucet" where they post new topics everyday, every week and every month. So they throw all these ideas at you and you go where you will with it. I have been wanting to post, but have not had time, but finally I did a drawing. The word is "Lizard King". I am pretty unfamiliar with Digital Painting, but I am starting to practice doing it more.

They think I do not know a buttload of crap about the Gospel, but I do!

HAHA I Love Nacho Libre! Ok, I admit that had nothing to do with my art, but it makes me laugh and I pretty much run the show here. I have been studying up on some anatomy books (Go google Andrew Loomis. All his books are out there for free and they rock!). Anyway, I have been trying to more figure out what is important to study, so I don't actually have alot of drawings from that. Although I do have some new caricatures to post!





On another note, I sold another one of my paintings at Ces't La Vie (the flowers pictured a few posts down). So thats 2 down, 1 to go!

What the?

I have not drawn been drawing enough monsters lately, which is a shame because they are my favorite thing to draw. Ironically, I drew this while watching Monsters Inc. with my sister (LOVE that movie). It was also fun to get back into shading. I have made a departure from it ever since I started pursuing more cartoon/animation endeavors.

A cool new excercise

I recently signed up for Stephen Silver's character design class over at Schoolism.com. He talks about drawing from photo references and using them as a guideline rather that to copy. One exercise he talked about was to first quickly copy the drawing, the take away the first drawing and reference. Then you do another drawing of the same pose, but just from what you remember from the original sketch. The energy, the basic pose, etc. From there, you take it wherever you want. I was doing this this morning and the original pose spoke to me and took me in a TOTALLY different direction. Here is a quick sketch of what came out of this excercise this morning:
Not exactely a masterpiece, but I told myself that I would put my quick morning sketches up, whether I liked them or not.

Where Have I been?

I know, I have not really been keeping up on posting like I said, which I hope to fix here, but I have been super busy. Actually, I have been making alot of art and then going on vacation, so I just havn't had the time to put stuff up. I was crazy busy preparing for two art shows that I had in my local area. One was in a local trinket shop my mom works at and the paintings I did were a little different than what I normally do. A little more abstract I guess you could say. I actually sold one of them too! My first sold painting ever! Here are the 3 pieces I made for that:



They are actually really big in real life, and I used a TON of modeling paste to create texture. So you can't really get a full feel of it on the computer but whatever. Also, I was doing some art for a show I have in the city center. They needed a "youth" to display art there and they remembered me from when I won the poster contest last year. I actually didn't bother to scan alot of the art before putting it up, especially the new stuff, but here is one of the pieces:


And finally, I have been doing caricatures for some of my friends. I am still not satisfied with where I am at, but looking at where I was even a couple of months ago with this, I am pretty happy with the progress I am making. Here are a few samples of those:



Like I said, I will be updating more often now that things are less crazy. The straight truth is that I really need to be sketching more, so expect to see just some sketches coming up soon.

Dylan